


Call Waiting

by Lyrstzha



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Dean Angst, Dysfunctional Family, Flash Fic, Gen, POV Dean Winchester, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-22
Updated: 2013-11-22
Packaged: 2018-01-02 09:13:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1055034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyrstzha/pseuds/Lyrstzha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Dean dies, it's just for a minute or two. Afterward, he picks up his phone and stalls out with his fingers trailing uncertainly over the buttons. Who's he gonna call?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Call Waiting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lunabee34 (Lorraine)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorraine/gifts).



The first time Dean dies, it's just for a minute or two. EMTs resuscitate him after he manages to get mostly drowned by a kelpie in a YMCA pool, which is really kind of embarrassing. At least he'd managed to get its bridle off to burn later, so that's his mission accomplished.

It's not that he was trying to die or some emo shit like that. It's just that he wasn't as careful as he maybe should have been, is all. He went in like someone had his back, forgetting that nobody did.

Afterward, he picks up his phone and stalls out with his fingers trailing uncertainly over the buttons. Who's he gonna call? Dad would chew him out, make him feel every inch of the scope of his failure, make him feel like he wasn't sucking it up as much as he ought to be. Something about talking to his dad has a way of making Dean feel like he isn't enough.

And he can't call Sam, not now. Because he's afraid that Sam won't answer, that he won't want to listen. He afraid that Sam won't really care – not beyond the vague, general way that Sam cares about everybody, anyway.

Frankly, Dean would rather be dead after all than find out if that's true. He can't really think of anything worse than that right now, which is really saying something.

So he doesn't call anyone. He stops at a motel, like always, and finds a seedy bar, like always. He finds himself saying, “Hey, I died yesterday,” to some random red-headed chick like it's a cheesy _pick-up line_. She eats it up, actually, but, for reasons that he can't name, Dean finds himself going back to his dingy motel room alone. It's cold, the bedsprings squeak like angry rats, and it smells of the stale lives of strangers.

He doesn't fall asleep for a long time, but he lies there with his phone in his hand anyway. He has the strangest urge to call random numbers, just to see who might pick up.

“Reach out and touch someone,” he mutters to the empty room, and his voice seems too loud. Maybe tomorrow, when he's long gone, someone else will stretch out in the lumpy divot down the center of this sad mattress and wait for sleep that won't come. It's oddly comforting to think of.

After a while, Dean thinks he hears something crying – maybe a child, maybe a fox in the trees behind the motel – but when he looks, there's nothing.


End file.
